The management wishes to apologize for the outages today. At one point while I had an SSH connection open, I started getting “CPU overheating - switching to clock-modulated mode” messages from the server. I can only imagine how miserable it must have been in there for the hamsters.

Our traffic has grown past the point where a single dedicated server can handle it (as I’ve whined before), and I’ve been spending time today designing the database for the new server, and plotting the course of the conversion to MySQL from our current flat file system.

The situation will improve soon, but a change this fundamental does take time and planning, and Stinky Beaumont and I appreciate your patience.

Here’s an open thread while I wrestle with MySQL’s Collation attribute. (Yes, I know there have been some errors trying to post comments — more traffic-related gremlins, now fixed.)